The Way of Grief
by Musamea
Summary: A loosely connected series on Scott’s thoughts after Alkali Lake. Movieverse.
1. Gloriana

**Title:** The Way of Grief  
**Author: **Musamea  
**Rating:** PG-13 for language and sexuality  
**Disclaimer: **X-Men belong to Stan Lee, Marvel, Fox, etc. I just play around in their universe.  
**Summary:** (WIP) A loosely connected series on Scott's thoughts after Alkali Lake. Movieverse.  
**General Author's Note: **These pieces are set in the post X2 movieverse even though I incorporated a few things from the comics (character cameos as well as a less drastic age difference between Scott and Jean).

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1. Gloriana 

Yesterday, I found a single strand of her hair on the sleeve of my jacket. It just lay there right in front of me, shining bright ruby in a setting of dull red, when I glanced down to check my watch. I stood still for an entire minute, arm up, head tilted, staring as if I'd never seen hair, or fabric, or watches before.

I loved her hair. I loved how red it was, of course, but also the way sleep scattered it over both of our pillows at night, the way a windy, blustery sort of day would send it dancing across her face and leave some of strands stuck to her lip gloss, the way gravity would pull it all down in a tumbling mass of flame when she tugged out her clips, the way it curtained us both from the world when she'd lean down to kiss me during all those lazy afternoons we spent making love in our bedroom while the sunlight streaming through our window threw leaf-shaped shadows against the wall.

I haven't gone into that room since Alkali Lake. It was her room first, back in our early days at the mansion, when I still wore skinny black leather pants and her bright braid swung down past her waist. As part of the professor's first group of students, we got our pick of living space, and she and I ended up on opposite ends of one hall. I liked my extra large bath; she liked her view. As long there weren't icicles hanging down from the edge of the roof, her window was always open. During the years she was in med school, I'd often pass by her room late at night and feel a sliver of breeze reach out to me from behind her half closed door. Sometimes I'd knock once, walk in and perch myself at the very edge of her desk (the only place left empty of her clutter of index cards, multi-colored highlighters, empty coffee mugs, biology texts and chemistry notes), and say, "Jesus, Jean, don't doctors ever sleep?" And she'd smile and flick off her desk light, then turn her face toward the night air pouring through the window and say, "This is rest enough for me." Which was true enough then, before twenty-four hour shifts in the ER during residency, where she learned to snatch naps anywhere, at any time, in any situation. She was the only person who could sleep through the mansion's fire drills.

When we decided to move in together and it came time to choose whose room we'd share, she said there was nothing I could offer that would make her give up 'her trees,' not even an offer of sex in the hot tub.

"That's your fantasy, Scott, not mine."

"Right. Yours, apparently, is to do it in a tree house," I grumbled back, half pleased and half annoyed that she already knew me so well, even if she _was_ a telepath. But we did use my old room for just that purpose a couple times, before Hank became our resident mad scientist and needed the bigger tub, before the professor acquired the Blackbird and she and I would sneak down to the hangar at two in the morning, palms sweating, horny as hell, and giggling like two truant teenagers (even though I was already teaching my first Calculus class by then and she was halfway to becoming Jean Grey M.D., Ph.D.).

We didn't make a big to-do about moving in together. The Professor didn't want any fuss, first of all, and neither did we. Xavier's no prude, but he said that unless we were getting married, he didn't see any reason for us to make a production out of changing which sink I spat my toothpaste into every morning.

"We are all three of us too busy with other matters to have to explain or defend your choice a dozen times over," he said. "Besides, only fools develop relationships just to flaunt them."

So we'd taken a morning during the school week when the kids were still in class to move hangers, books, toiletries, and the few other things I'd accumulated since arriving at the mansion. There wasn't that much. I'm not a packrat; I can't be when I need to be able to know exactly where everything is if I ever lose my glasses. That's actually how Jean became much more methodical and neat in her ways. She came back into the room one morning to find me with just a towel clutched around my waist, stumbling around blind, frantic because she'd moved my glasses from the desk to the bedside table while I was in the shower.

But that morning, before she knew this about me (there are, after all, some things you only learn about a person when you live together), she teased me for my seeming lack of sentimentality. "No ticket stubs, Scott. No coasters stolen from the restaurant we went to for our first real date; no brochures from museums or gift wrap from Christmas presents."

"Jesus, people actually keep that shit?" I'd asked, grinning.

"Pragmatist." She kissed me as I passed her in the doorway with my last armload of books. Later, when I woke up from my first nap in 'our' bed, she wasn't there, but she'd left a copy of the room key on the floor next to my shoes, where I'd be sure to see it. And that was that.

I don't go down that hall anymore. When we got back from Washington, I locked our door, pocketed the key, and went to find a place to bunk down on the other side of the mansion. I couldn't – and still can't – face the thought of staying in that room, with all her things, with so many reminders of our life together, knowing that I'm not going to wake up in the morning and find her beside me, knowing that she's never going to slip into bed after I've been asleep for several hours and wake me by pushing her cold toes against my feet for warmth.

No one questioned my decision not to use that room, even though space has been scarce (in a _mansion_, for Christ's sake) while we repair the damage Stryker's soldiers left behind. Someone – Wagner, I think, though it could certainly have been the Professor, who has the master key to all the mansion's doors – retrieved my sleeping goggles and some clothes and left them in a neat pile by my new bed. Everyone else pretended not to notice where I was spending my nights. Hank tactfully offered me my 'old living quarters' back, but the fiasco with Cerebro had left him sprouting blue fur and sharp canines, burlier than ever. He's never needed the large tub more.

Besides, I still associate the early days of our relationship with my old room. It holds too many memories of pacing back and forth before stepping down the hall and knocking on her door, as nervous as any high-school boy picking up his date for the prom for all that we saw each other every day at the dinner table.

And that's the problem. Everywhere I go in the mansion I'm reminded of her: standing sentinel by the coffeepot in the kitchen, her eyes bleary in the early morning; bent over a gel plate down in the lab, one vertical line of concentration creasing between her eyebrows; playing foosball in the den; honing her TK in the danger room; playing chess with the Professor in his study. There are too many spaces that just seem half empty all the time now, without her hair blazing out at me like a beacon whenever I step through the door.

So one room, full of tangible mementos, shouldn't make that much of a difference. But it does. Everything in it makes a difference – the large bed that we purchased to celebrate when she got her license to practice medicine, her two dozen pairs of shoes lined up along the rack I built for them ("What the hell do you need four different kinds of black heels for, Jean?"), the picture we took of ourselves in Central Park by holding the camera at arm's length so that the end result is focused somewhere slightly above our heads and cuts half of my face out of the frame.

I'm not ready to face living with all the reminders yet. I'm sure Logan would have a hard time with whatever's left of her scent in the room, but I don't have his abilities and would probably only be able to find a trace of her perfume on her pillow. What I'm not ready for is clearing out her half of the bathroom shelf and putting her clothes in boxes to take to Goodwill. I'm not ready to clean up the small spatters of her makeup on the sink or throw away her bottles of hair-dye.

Oh yes, Jean dyed her hair. You don't come through med school and various missions to save the world without that particular souvenir for your efforts. She didn't tell me when she first started doing it, disposing of the empty bottles in the lab's biohazard bin. In fact, I didn't find out until nearly a year later, when I caught her red-handed (pun intended) with thick goop and a plastic cap on her head.

"You really don't care?" she'd asked anxiously.

"Why should I?"

"I'm getting old, Scott."

"You're getting ridiculous, if you really think that."

"Are you sure?"

"Read my mind if you don't believe me."

She stopped hiding her boxes and special conditioners after that, even though the link between us sometimes flashed with her uncertainty whenever a hair color commercial came on the TV.

_I don't keep secrets from you, Scott_, she'd told me once in an argument, anger paving the way for truth. No secrets, except for how bad those furniture-rearranging nightmares must have really been, except for how afraid she was of her own growing power.

_I won't let anything happen to you_, I'd said. And in the end, something did happen and I couldn't help her.

And now I'm not ready to confront the leavings of her life.

So I go about my day, waking each morning in a foreign bed, feeling as though the bathroom is far too big without her there to bump into. I teach Calculus, even though Hank could sub for me, because I've long forgotten what to do with myself during the empty stretches of time that classes take out of a day. The kids are subdued in my class, or at least they try to be. Sometimes the ones who weren't at Alkali Lake forget and pass notes, throw spitballs, wonder aloud at the future usefulness of knowing the derivative of the sine of x. They're quelled easily by one look from Bobby or Rogue, who do not realize that the respectful hush often hurts worse than normality. Normality allows me to pretend that there's not a hole in my life, that time will heal, that I am what they all call me behind my back – Fearless.

Do they still believe that, even after seeing me fall apart? Do they realize how quickly I notice the gaps now?

An empty seat in my classroom with a row of small scorch marks dotting the edge of the desk.

Darwin's _Origin of Species_ left open on the coffee table in the den.

The cold sheets on one side of the bed.

A hair on my sleeve.

**

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Author's Note on Chapter 1:** In the comics, Henry McCoy's secondary mutation was caused by experiments with a chemical catalyst. In this fic, I explained it by adopting an abandoned plot idea mentioned by Singer in the DVD commentaries for X2, which involved Cerebro triggering a loss of control over and/or a manifestation of their powers in mutants worldwide. 

Darwin's still controversial _Origin of Species_ was published on November 24, 1859. His theory natural selection is considered one of the major foundations for population genetics and evolutionary science today.

Gloriana is, of course, the name Edmund Spenser used in his _Faerie Queene _for Queen Elizabeth I, another famous redhead.


	2. Holding Pattern

2. Holding Pattern

Hank's taken over teaching the Biology classes.

"It is the least I can do," he'd said when I asked him if he _really_ wanted to put himself through three periods of students-who-don't-give-a-rat's-ass about pea plants and taxonomy.

I know he feels guilty for being in Oslo when the mansion was attacked. It's an irrational emotion coming from one of the most rational, Enlightenment-minded men that I know. But none of us are being rational these days.

I see it in their eyes: Ro's are regretful and often filmed over with white these days, as if she's trying to reassure herself of her own powers, as if all the weather phenomena now can somehow be channeled back to Alkali Lake and dispose of that wall of water; Bobby's are often bloodshot, a sign of too many sleepless nights spent asking himself what the use of his mutation is if he couldn't save his teacher and mentor; the Professor's are grief-stricken – Jean was like a daughter to him, the first mutant whom he taught to control her powers, the only mutant whose mind could reach back to touch his; and Logan's… Logan's eyes haunt me. They are, to my mind, what my own eyes might look like, if it weren't for the visor and the killing beams.

But at least the rest of them can cry, even if they won't admit to it come morning. My genes robbed me of that particular comfort long ago, and my training now robs me of many more.

I can't stop being the leader of the X-Men, even now. The Professor called me into his office a week after we returned from Washington. The room had been trashed by Stryker's soldiers just like most of the rest of the school, but we'd insisted on repairing it first, so that on the afternoon of our meeting, Xavier was seated in a setting as near to his natural habitat as we could make it.

"No one would blame you if you took some time to grieve, Scott," he said to me, his voice full of gentle concern. "Let Henry and Warren take over your classes for awhile. Live in a different setting-"

I shook my head. "I can't leave now, Professor. How many people around the world are going to want retribution now, after what happened?" I hated to remind him of what he perceived as his own failure, but it was the truth. And I'd learned long ago from Jean how useless it is to hide your feelings from a telepath.

He steepled his fingers together and regarded me steadily over them. "You are pushing yourself too hard, Scott."

_Please don't play the clueless telepath with me_, I begged him mentally. _This is the only way I know how to be. I'd be lost if I didn't fill all my hours with work._ But aloud, I only said, "There are a lot of things that need to get done."

And that's the truth. I have a list in my head – fix Blackbird, buy drywall, watch the kids for signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, discuss lesson plans with Hank – it goes on and on. Because that's my job: to get things done, to sweat the small stuff, to be Cyclops, their fearless leader. Even now, except for that brief moment outside of time, when I'd fallen apart after seeing Jean's flaming red frame disappear beneath the wave, I can't break out of my role.

I don't know if I want to. The mindless tasks help. Calling insurance companies and straddling a wing of the Blackbird with wrench in hand help. Making the rounds at night, enforcing curfew, writing up a meal plan with the cook help.

I'm too afraid to let myself fall apart. Before, whenever the migraines or the stress overtook me, Jean was always there, her hands smoothing the wrinkles from my forehead, her thoughts soothing my mind through our link. No one ever realized it, but Jean was Stodgy Scott's rock. And I was hers, in return. Except at the end, when I'd wake to find her nightmares ripping our room apart, when she'd locked me in the Blackbird to face the wave alone, when I couldn't help her anymore.

The Professor watches me with understanding, for all that he worries I'm going to crack and have a mental breakdown beneath the strain. The others are puzzled or angered by my apparent lack of emotion.

"Why doesn't he ever cry?" I heard one of Hank's students ask yesterday afternoon, when I passed by the half-open classroom door.

Of course I stopped to listen to his reply.

"It is a result of his mutation. His lachrymatory glands were destroyed at the first manifestation of his beams, so he is unable to produce tears-"

As great and detailed as Hank's scientific explanation was, I knew it must have ultimately left the questioner unsatisfied. She'd wanted to know why I don't seem to _grieve_, which is equated with weeping, in her mind.

I can't cry, that doesn't mean I don't mourn. Some hurts go far too deep to ever be expressed or relieved by tears.

Maybe I'm still in denial. The first stage of grief, according to my college Psych course. Then anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Well, thank you, Ms. Kubler-Ross, but I don't think your neat little chart quite covers it all. What about the way you feel alienated from all of your loved ones, as if they're all standing on the other side of a transparent wall that you can't – and don't want to – break through? What about the way just getting through each day begins to require all of your resources? What about the hollow ache that sits in your chest? What about the guilt you feel whenever you forget for a moment and laugh at a joke? What about the way everything seems suspended out of time, like you're flying in a holding pattern, waiting for the tower to give you the signal to land?

Human grief is a damned sight more complex than your list makes it out to be.

The people who mean well are the ones who hurt me the most. I get cards from those of Jean's colleagues who have met me, with clichéd phrases to the tune of "Time heals" or "She lived a full life," as if letting go of her is made any easier by the fact that Jean was a foremost expert in her field. Even the others in the mansion do it. I don't blame them; I know their attempts are born out of sympathy, shared grief, and a true desire to help… but I swear to God, every time I get an offer of more coffee or help in grading tests or a listening ear if I need one, I feel like ripping off my visor. I lost a _person_, not a limb. I don't need to be treated like a cripple.

Surprisingly enough, the one person whose sympathy I don't mind is the person I know least. Maybe it's because Wagner has never verbalized how 'sorry' he is to me. Maybe it's because I have a feeling that his eyes have always been filled with such melancholy and the sadness I see in his gaze has nothing to do with pitying me. After all, you don't carve symbols for all the sins of humanity into your own flesh without carrying more than your share of the world's grief. I suffer because I lost someone I loved; Wagner, on the other hand, suffers because loss exists.

He's not a philosopher in the truest sense of the word like Hank is; not a _lover of knowledge_, but sometimes I feel that The Incredible Nightcrawler is infinitely wise in a way that has nothing to do with book learning.

He's settled into life here with more grace than I'd expected. He's taken on a small set of students for a German class, does all the heavy lifting (or should I call it the heavy bamffing?), delights and distracts the children with his acrobatic antics, and climbs the outer walls of the mansion at night.

I know that Ro has been going to him with some of the concerns that she once would have brought to me. I might resent that if I weren't grateful that she is able to find her comfort and strength somewhere. God knows I'm not providing any right now. Wagner and Hank have struck up quite a friendship as well.

"He is instructing me in the ways of being cerulean," Hank informed me this morning when I happened across them strolling the grounds.

"And Herr McCoy is showing me around the property."

"Quite a partnership," I replied, smiling. It was the kind of bright day that gives me a headache in ten minutes flat, but I didn't make an excuse to leave them and go inside. Maybe it was an echo of Wagner's quiet words in the Blackbird that made me stay.

_The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want… Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of the death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me._

I wanted to ask him where his quiet certainty came from; how he could possibly believe in a God who had created him in the shape of a demon. I settled for directing a "How're the Bio classes" at Hank.

He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and shook his head. "I'd forgotten how different teaching a high school course is from lecturing at a university or to a panel of fellow biochemists, Scott. The children are rather… exuberant, and I am not sure if I am accurately matching my style to Jean's in terms of level of difficulty or depth of information."

"Her old tests and lesson plans are in her office," I said. "You can go through them if you'd like, since no one else-" _is going to need them now_, I almost finished. _God, Jean, I miss you._

Hank put a hand on my shoulder. "You know, Freud said-"

"Freud said a lot of shit," I retorted. "Don't try to psychoanalyze me."

He ignored me. "Freud said _the only way to forget is to remember_."

I laughed, a harsh sound against the soft whisper of breeze and twitter of birdsong. "You think I don't remember her, when all I see when I look around is memories of Jean? And tell me what the big fucking deal with healing is anyway, Hank. Why _should_ I forget? I'm still doing everything that everyone requires of me. I'm overseeing repairs, I'm leading the team, I'm teaching my goddamn Calculus classes, so let me indulge myself in this one way and don't try to tell me how I ought to grieve."

_I can't cry, that doesn't mean I don't mourn_.

He was silent for some time. Then, "Do you think she'd want to see you like this?" At least it wasn't an offer to help.

I closed my eyes, beginning to feel the effects of standing outside in the warning throb around my temples. "No. No, she wouldn't."

"It is not disloyalty for your life to move on, you know."

But what if I don't want it to? Why do you all think I want to forget, to pick up the pieces, to rebuild without her beside me?

I only nodded, eyes still closed. I listened to their footsteps crunch away over the gravel path, waiting until I couldn't hear them anymore before opening my eyes and turning back toward the mansion.

A small bang of displaced air broke the silence as Wagner appeared before me. He stood looking at me, eyes to visor, then placed both hands on my shoulder in an odd sort of benediction.

"The Lord bless thee and keep thee," he said quietly. "The Lord cause his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace."

And then he was gone, leaving me with the sound of air rushing back into its place ("Nature abhors a vacuum," Jean had once taught) and eyes stinging in dryness.

**

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Author's Note on Chapter 2:** The Five Stages of Grief that Scott remembers come from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' book _On Death and Dying_, published in 1969. 

The scriptures quoted by Kurt come from the 23rd Psalm and the sixth chapter of Numbers.

The phrase "Nature abhors a vacuum" was first proposed by Aristotle.


	3. Sine Qua Non

This chapter is dedicated to the wonderful Minisinoo: thanks for Bereavement 101 and showing this newbie the ropes. She also gets major props for introducing me to my beta, Naomi, who is equally wonderful.

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3. Sine Qua Non 

The funeral was a joke. They wouldn't even call it a funeral, not without a corpse in a coffin at a gravesite.

Things would have been easier if there had been a body.

But even that was denied us. I didn't need Hank's longwinded physics explanation to know that Jean's body had disintegrated when the wave hit her.

Her family held a "memorial service," a lie from beginning to end. The Professor told her parents what had happened, of course, told them she saved us all, that she was a hero, a martyr, selfless, brave, and a hell of a lot more shit like that.

_What's so selfless about leaving so much grief behind you, Jean? Couldn't you have been a hero from _inside_ the Blackbird?_

The party line to her extended family, colleagues, and non-mutant friends was that she'd drowned in a water-skiing accident. The bigger the lie, the more people believe it, right?

Everyone believed it. After all, the news stations were flooded for weeks after Alkali Lake with stories of planes falling out of the skies, images of piles of mangled cars smoking on highways, talk of trains colliding, miscarriages, heart attacks… what was one more death in the midst of such chaos?

Warren attended the service with the Professor, 'Ro, and me. A public appearance for Hank and Wagner so soon after what was already being termed a "massive mutant terrorist attack" was out of the question; and after we'd made the mansion semi-habitable again, Logan had disappeared to God-only-knows-where.

"Do you think he's gone for good?" Rogue had asked me, unconsciously clasping and unclasping her gloved fingers.

_No, right now he's just being true to his Wolverine personality. He'll lick his wounds in private, in pride, and when he comes back, he'll be more stoic and hard to read than ever. It's the way of the alpha male._ I am one; I ought to know. But all I said to her was, "He'll be back. He's chosen his side now."

_She won't be back. She made a choice… she chose you_.

Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Did you honestly think that Jean Grey, M.D., Ph.D., was that stupid? Did you expect me to say, "Oh, hey, Logan, thanks a lot for telling me that my girl rejected you when you put the moves on her while Stryker was fucking around with my head"?

Maybe it was a good thing he didn't come with us; I don't think I could've taken any more patronizing that day.

It was hard enough, with all of Jean's parents' friends' spouses – or whoever the hell all those people were. I didn't know three-fourths of them, and the few that I knew, I'd met back in the skinny-black-leather-pants days. I doubt many of them would have recognized me if it hadn't been for the shades. None of them knew what to say to me, of course. After all, I'd never put a ring on Jean's finger, so they couldn't put me in the part of the grieving widower. I was the boyfriend-cum-tentative-fiancé at best. At worst, I was the prick who wouldn't make an honest woman out of her.

What did they know, anyhow?

When we'd first started living together, Jean and I had agreed to make each other no promises beyond committing ourselves to seeing if we'd work out. We were both so young and so incredibly new to the idea of a serious relationship that it felt safer to have that 'out.'

We were both control freaks; me in my "organize the closet by color and leave the shades exactly two inches to the left from the bedside lamp" way, and she in her "I have to run this gel at exactly this voltage" way. It came with the territory – Jean couldn't even begin to build an identity for herself until she learned how to rein in her TP, to wall out other people's thoughts and feelings. And I – well, I can't control my mutation, so I have to control nearly everything else. Maybe it's not the best way to live, but what choice did we really have?

So maybe we made that agreement because we were novices at the whole long-term commitment thing. Or maybe it was because we were so used to being in control of our own lives that we didn't know how to share that responsibility with another person or how to trust that someone else would be as careful as we needed them to be. I don't know; back then we just thought that we were being practical about our future.

And then, as more kids started enrolling at the school and we became the default 'dorm parents' by virtue of being a couple and living together, everyone began to assume that Jean and I had some sort of unspoken agreement about getting married 'one day.' At first, we'd laughed about it.

"They're taking bets on which of us is holding out on the other one," Jean told me one night in bed.

"Is that so?"

"Mmmm." She'd pushed her hair out of her eyes and smiled up at me. "So far, the wagering is more heavily in favor of my biological clock ticking and you being a chump who's not willing to give up his freedom."

"Ha! The joys of having a telepath for a girlfriend." I'd grinned and kissed her forehead. "So what's the other side saying?"

"I'm a coldhearted bitch who won't make the Boy Scout happy."

It was a joke then, but as the years passed and more and more of the students switched their bets to 'my side,' it stopped being funny.

"I don't get it," I'd complained to Warren once. "First off, our love life should be no one's business but our own. And secondly, isn't the ticking time bomb of a biological clock theory supposed to get _more_ valid the older we both get?"

"Scott. You live in a _school_, with _teenagers_. You're deluding yourself if you think you can keep your private life private. As for the other thing, I don't know. Maybe they think Jean wears the pants in the relationship, so if she wanted to get married, then you'd be married?"

"I'm being serious here!"

"Okay, okay! No need to hit me." He'd smiled, the tips of his wings twitching a little. "I really don't know. But Scott… since you brought the subject up… why _aren't_ the two of you married? You've only been together _forever_."

"Your guess is as good as mine, War."

Except it wasn't. I knew exactly why I hadn't asked Jean. It wasn't because I was still unsure we'd work out, and it sure as hell wasn't because of the other practical reason of how hard it'd be on the kids if we ever went through a legal breakup.

The truth is that I was waiting for Jean to take that out. Maybe I'd been holding my breath all along, but every time I started to get up the nerve to propose, I'd wonder just what the hell Jean Grey was doing with _me_. Make no mistake: I knew she loved me, I knew she was loyal to me. Even when Logan came along, I never doubted that she wouldn't let things get beyond flirting. But I couldn't help wondering if she was acting out of habit, if she was staying because the idea of us had become comfortable, if the choice was even conscious or not.

_She made a choice_. _She chose you_.

It wasn't until she was gone that I began to realize that maybe she was also waiting for me to take the out. That while I had been watching her for hints of restlessness and disenchantment, she'd been examining me just as closely for the same feelings. That the whispers of "what's he doing with an aging, too-serious, too-severe doctor" had gotten to her more than she'd let on.

I may have been the Fearless Leader, Xavier's right hand, the guy who had been groomed to wear black leather and give orders, but I'd also been the guy who planned elaborate pranks with the kids, the guy whose youthful escapades had become the stuff of legend around the mansion. Jean was never like that; it was more in her nature to be doctor- and scientist-in-residence than to pal around with the students and act like she was just 'one of them.' She wasn't, and any attempt to pretend otherwise would have been glaringly obvious and unwanted. The kids know that the Professor and I will take care of them; Jean was another sort of safety net. She was the paragon, perhaps, the woman that half of the guys wanted to grow up to be with, that half of the girls wanted to grow up to be. It was an unrealistic expectation, and it must have been so lonely for her, knowing they thought that way about her.

And I was just as blind as my namesake about all those undercurrents. That's the danger, I think, when you're so close to someone. You don't always want to analyze them the way you would any other person or situation. You're so afraid of what you might realize that you don't notice what you _should_ realize.

I'd always believed that Jean and I were married to each other in every way but law, and that no ceremony with a white dress and flowers could make a difference to us. I still believe that. But that day, at the memorial service, I wished with everything inside of me that I could have a chance to do things over, that I _had_ put a ring on her finger and kissed her and heard her announced by my name (even if it was just that once, as I wasn't at all sure if she'd take it). Maybe it wouldn't have changed the important parts of our relationship, but it would have declared to the public what we already knew between the two of us. That we were giving up some personal control, that we wouldn't take the out that we'd initially left ourselves because of inexperience or practicality or fear. Maybe it wouldn't have changed much; maybe it would have spared her a great deal of anxiety, in her last few months.

I couldn't say any of this at the memorial service. I was still in shock, first of all, and hadn't thought things out so clearly. But then again, I don't think many people would have understood anyhow. It would take too many words to explain, and I was in no mood to talk.

So I crept away after ten minutes of awkward mingling, leaving Warren and the Professor to take care of the social niceties. _They're far better at it than I am_, I told myself. _And I'll spare the rest of these people the awkwardness of figuring out what to say to me_.

There were some kids, maybe aged three to six, playing on the grassy hill behind the spot where the food and punch for the reception had been set up. It was a hot, sunny day, and the boys had ditched their shoes and little jackets at the first opportunity. More than one girl's mother would despair at the state of her Sunday dress and carefully curled hair when the day was over. But the scolding and lessons in propriety would come later. For now, the children ran around shrieking with laughter, oblivious to all the adults in black talking about a woman they'd never met.

I watched them with a smile on my face and a lump in my throat. Jean and I had rarely talked about children, and then only in the most theoretical of ways, couched in scientific terms and genetic musing. Another one of those things we'd get to 'one day.'

_God, Jean, what would a kid of ours have looked like? I wanted to watch you getting big with our child; I never knew how much I wanted that until now. Why did I think we were invincible? Why did I always think I'd go first? Is it selfish of me to wish that I could have gone first?_

Elaine Grey found me. Jean's mother only came up to my shoulder – she'd gotten her height from her dad – but Elaine was who Jean had taken after in looks. They'd shared the same shape of eyes and mouth, same high cheekbones, and same elegance of bearing. And Elaine's graying hair still showed strands of deep red.

She seemed incredibly fragile, standing there beside me with her arms crossed, watching the figures on the hill.

"Did you ever want grandchildren?" I asked her. "Even though they were basically guaranteed to be mutants?"

She didn't turn her head to look at me when she answered. "Love is love, Scott. Mutation never made a difference with Jean, and it wouldn't have with your children." She paused, then added so softly I had to lean in a little to catch her words, " I just wish that there was more we could have done for her."

I glanced down at my shoes. _Don't be sorry_, I wanted to tell her. _You were scared and uninformed when she manifested. You did the best you could. She always said that the experience taught her that money couldn't fix everything. She always said that she was stronger because of it_. But all of this could only have come out sounding hollow and empty and suspiciously like platitudes.

"I would have wanted our kids to have her hair," I said instead.

Elaine smiled softly. "Yes, and your eyes."

"Oh right, so that they'd have a literal killer gaze?" I snorted.

"Oh no. Jean showed me a picture once of you when you were young, Scott, before your mutation manifested. We agreed that you had the handsomest blue eyes this side of Steve McQueen."

"Oh." I dug my hands into my pockets, waited, then blurted out, "I'm sorry."

She turned to me, surprise written over her face. "Whatever for?"

"I didn't take care of her," I said, hating myself for being a selfish enough bastard to dump this on Jean's grieving mother. "I'm sorry I lost her… you probably blame me-"

"Scott."

"What?"

"Look at me. Jean died for what she believed in. It wasn't your fault, or anyone else's."

"I was the mission leader. I should have stopped her. I should have _known_, dammit. What good is sharing a mental link with someone if you can't predict what they're going to do?"

"What good is a relationship if you _can_?" she demanded. "You and Jean were always respectful of each other's privacy, even though you had that special connection. There was no way you could have known. Charles Xavier told me that my daughter made a choice. A choice that saved the people she loved. Are you, of all people, going to devalue that now?"

_She made a choice_. _She chose you_.

"I miss her," I whispered. "I had no idea you could miss a person as much as I miss her."

"Oh, my dear, of course you do," Elaine said. "Of course you do." Just that. Nothing about time healing all wounds or things eventually getting easier. Just the acknowledgment of my feelings and water glimmering in her eyes.

We stood there, watching the children, until Warren came to get me.

"Are you ready to go?" he asked, nodding to where 'Ro, with a black scarf tied over her hair, stood beside the Professor's chair. Warren's eyes were tired, and his shoulders were slouched in the position they always took when his wing rack was hurting him.

_I was ready to go before I got here_. "Yeah, go ahead to the car. I'll be with you in a moment."

He took Elaine's arm and escorted her away while I trudged back to the stone they'd set up for Jean. I was glad that the Greys hadn't chosen a gaudy, towering angel or something equally pretentious. Then again, I shouldn't have been that surprised. Jean was nothing if not tasteful, and she'd learned class from her parents.

So a rectangular marble slab set into the ground was all that confronted me. _Jean Grey, loving friend and daughter_. If I'd married her, 'wife' would be on the memorial. But I hadn't. So there was nothing carved into the stone about ten years of devoted and practical love, of seeing each other at our best and our worst and still holding on. Nothing to stand for ten years of sharing a bed and fitting comfortably into each other's arms and celebrating anniversaries with champagne and red lingerie. Nothing to signify ten years of refusing to give up.

None of that was on there. A short dash between two dates represented her whole life. There was nothing about how she lived that life, what she fought for, what made her laugh and cry and blaze up in anger.

Nothing about the choices she made.

**

* * *

Author's Note on Chapter Three:** The Latin phrase "sine qua non" is most often paraphrased "a necessary thing," but the more literal translation is "without which not." 


	4. The Thing with Feathers

4. The Thing with Feathers

The door was open.

I don't know how. In the time it had taken me to descend the stairs and then return to the second floor with the final box of pieces for Hank's new, specially ordered, extra-large bed, someone had opened the door to Jean's and my old room.

I almost didn't notice it. I'd balanced the box on my left shoulder and it had blocked the door from my already-limited peripheral vision. But something, perhaps a slight draft, maybe a small alarm in the back of my mind, stopped me in my tracks and made me look at what I'd avoided for months.

The door was open. The room was dark except for a small, rectangular swathe of light cast into it from the hallway. My shadow fell into the rectangle, disproportionate and larger than life. I could hear the school growing quiet around me: Hank humming a classical tune in his room; sinks turning on and off; Logan's heavy tread as he made the rounds, inspecting locks and alarm systems. I couldn't move.

I could remember standing paralyzed like this years before, working up my nerve to ask Jean out. And then later, far enough into our relationship that I wasn't a sweating bundle of anxiety, but early enough that I was still rooming down the hall, waiting for her to appear one evening. _Jean Grey, what in hell can be taking you so long to primp, woman? We're going to a movie, at night, in a dark theater._ She'd swept open her door, laughing, and pulled me inside. We never made it to the theater that night.

The door was open.

"Scott--"

My name was barely out of Hank's mouth before I dropped the box and lunged at him.

"Is this your idea of a fucking _joke_?" I hissed, shoving him against the wall and pressing one arm against his throat.

He blinked, surprised, then pushed me off of him.

Hank's always been a big guy, and he's even bigger now, thanks to that secondary mutation triggered by Cerebro. I hit the opposite wall with a thud, then rebounded and reached for him again. _Son of a--_

He caught my arm mid-swing. "Scott! What-" My other fist connected with his jaw and then I was sent backward through the air again. Another thud as I landed on my ass and hit my head against the wall. Adrenaline had me up on my feet again moments later, hands balled into fists.

"Scott Summers!" Hank bellowed. "What on God's green earth do you think you're doing? _Don't make me hurt you_."

"Then what the fuck do you call this?" I jerked a thumb at the door. "Is this all part of your Heal Fearless Leader plan? Step one, psychobabble about what Jean not wanting to see Scott like this. Check. Step two, make Scott snap out of his denial. Check. What's step three, huh? Find new, hot, young telepath for Scott? Tell the truth, _Beast_."

He went absolutely still at that, and we faced each other that way for several minutes, me with my chest heaving, Hank with glasses askew and not a twitch from a single muscle.

"Start from the beginning, if you please," he finally said. "What, exactly, is my offense?"

"You're saying you weren't the one who opened that door?" I jerked my head in the direction of the room I'd shared with Jean.

Hank's eyes flicked away from mine, widened slightly, then returned to meet my gaze. "No, Cyclops," he said, "I didn't." Then, very quietly, "First, I do not have a key to your old quarters. Second, I was in my room the entire time you were downstairs. You may check with Logan if you'd like; he left this hall very shortly before you returned. Third, if I _had_ done such a thing, I certainly would not have been foolish enough to remain here afterward, waiting for an attack such as the one that just occurred."

I became suddenly, nauseously aware of a dull throb at the base of my skull. I was going to have some very pretty bruises come the next morning, and Hank wasn't even breathing hard. Fighting him was the height of stupidity under any circumstances.

Well, I hadn't exactly been winning awards for my rationality in the past months.

I rubbed the back of my neck, grimacing when my fingers found a rapidly swelling knot beneath my hair. "I'm sorry. I saw the door, heard you, and I... I didn't even think, Hank. I'm sorry."

He nodded. "It's all right. I--I apologize too. For your head." _Yeah, you and me both._

"Take two aspirin and call you in the morning?"

That elicited a small, rueful smile from him. "Something like that. Now, Scott, about the door--"

I held up a hand. "Forget it, please."

"Scott--"

"_Hank_. Please. Not tonight."

He opened his mouth to protest again, then shut it and brushed past me to retrieve his box. "I'm here, you know."

"I know."

He nodded once, then went into his room and quietly shut his door.

I stood in the hall with my eyes closed for a long time, then squared my shoulders, turned, and entered my old room before I could talk myself out of it. My hand found the light switch and I flicked it up before closing and locking the door behind me.

The room was exactly as we'd left it the day of my capture. Jean's jacket was casually tossed over the desk chair; her reading glasses lay on top of an open book. It was one of her medical texts. I could see a diagram of the human brain from where I stood.

Is grief only a matter of chemicals? Is love, for that matter? We'd talked about that on several occasions, back when our future seemed so bright and such questions purely theoretical. My throat tightened.

_This too shall pass_. People tell me that, as though there's some magical date on the calendar marked with "Scott Summers--Healed." As though it's just a matter of waiting long enough for my life to go back to normal. Hello, _this_ is my new normal.

I walked over to the window and tugged it up. An autumn breeze, crisp and chill, swept into the room. I could almost hear her voice saying, _This is rest enough for me_.

A bookshelf stood next to our window, and I ran my fingers over the volumes. We'd both kept most of our professional texts in our offices or the lab and the garage, respectively; any book brought back to the room was for pleasure reading or unavoidable late-night work. We'd agreed early on that our room would be our haven, that we'd leave work at the office like any other normal couple.

Who were we trying to kid? We weren't a normal couple; we couldn't control being called from our beds at two a.m. to go save the world the morning before one of us needed to give a test or present a paper. I'd never tried to bar any of the kids from knocking on my door for some last minute tutoring, and Jean wouldn't have let me do so, even if I'd wanted to. But we'd kept the uniforms in the basement and the calculus books in the classroom. One last, futile bid for normalcy.

Our bookshelf was an old, completely overburdened piece of antique carpentry that might have once been considered attractive. Any appeal that it had once possessed was now lost beneath nicks and scratches on its dusty surfaces and the sagging of several shelves beneath their load of books. Jean and I were both readers, though she had preferred poetry, classic literature, and contemporary fiction while my slightly more eclectic tastes encompassed old-fashioned mysteries, philosophy, and any kind of historical or anthropological writing. New students were often surprised to find me hunched over my morning coffee with Plato in hand, but even calculus teachers need a break from their equations, and would-be heroes could learn a thing or two from Sun-Tzu.

I picked a slim volume off one of the to-be-read stacks on top of the bookshelf. A beautiful, leather-bound copy of Kahlil Gibran. The Professor had given it to us last Christmas, thinking it might satisfy both Jean's penchant for poetry and my taste for philosophical writing. I don't think either of us had read it before Jean... before Alkali Lake.

I opened the cover and fanned through the pages, stopping near the end to be confronted with:

_Farewell to you and the youth I have spent with you. It was but yesterday we met in a dream. You have sung to me in my aloneness, and I of your longings have built a tower in the sky. But now our sleep has fled and our dream is over, and it is no longer dawn. The noontide is upon us and our half waking has turned to fuller day, and we must part._

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. Even though she was older, I'd always thought I'd be the first to go. Women have longer life expectancies than men, after all. I'd had a hard-drinking, hard-partying, pack-a-day smoking life on the streets for several years of my youth; Jean was a doctor who had actually practiced all those healthy habits they tell you about in med school. Her only vice was a propensity for impractically tall heels. I was the leader of the X-Men; I went into combat. She was the telepath who was still learning control, who waited behind for us to come to her for healing.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this.

"It wasn't only a dream," I said aloud, as though she were beside me, as though she could hear me. _Farewell to you and the youth I have spent with you_. I snapped the book shut and tossed it onto the nightstand.

_Jean... God, woman, I miss you._

I sat down on our bed and thought of countless nights spent whispering to each other in the dark or speaking to each other in our minds; of making love, wildly, tenderly; or simply holding hands until we both fell asleep. My body responded at the thought of hers. This was slow torture. I picked up her pillow and buried my face in it, pretending that I could smell some trace of her scent in the fabric.

Hank's words, the ones that I had thrown back at him in the hall, came to me suddenly. _Do you think she'd want to see you like this?_

No. Yes. Maybe. I don't know. Probably not. But grief is for the living, and that's me, so I get to choose the when and how and how long.

I reached over to turn on the bedside lamp, but when I clicked the button, there was a small _pop_ and no light. I always kept a box of bulbs in the right-hand corner of our closet, but the thought of getting up and opening yet another set of doors, another flood of memories, was too much at the moment. I settled for unscrewing the old bulb and setting in on the nightstand. The tinny rattle of shattered filaments reached my ears: externally intact, broken inside. How fitting.

I lay down, still clutching her pillow to my chest, closing my eyes against the overhead light. One of the advantages of a telekinetic girlfriend was never needing to climb out of bed because you'd forgotten to flip the switch. I smiled a little at the memory, then sighed.

---

I woke from dreams of dark, cold water and vast distances to the sound of dozens of students rushing through the school to get to breakfast and their classes. I lay still for several minutes, content to stare up at the familiar play of light and shadows on the ceiling and listen to the signs of life in the mansion. I should have been more disoriented and uncomfortable from having slept in my clothes, with the overhead light on--

Except it wasn't, and I hadn't. My clothes were folded in a neat pile on the desk and I was snugly tucked under the blankets. _Did I manage that in my sleep?_ The only light in the room was the sunshine streaming through the window. I turned my head. The closed window. _But the door is still locked. What the hell?_ I pushed my glasses more firmly in place, ran my fingers through my hair, then stopped, my whole body singing with adrenaline when my palm reached the place where a knot that should have screamed its existence from the moment I woke wasn't where it should have been.

I scrambled out of bed and crossed the room to stand before the dresser. The mirror reflected only smooth, unmarred skin on my chest and back, where a trail of purple bruises ought to have been.

"What--"

A flash of red caught the corner of my eye and I turned, heart pounding. "Jean?"

The room was empty, but a long feather, exactly the shade of her hair, lay on top of the open book on the nightstand. I approached it, heart pounding, to find that the feather marked off a few lines above the passage that I had read the previous night:

_Forget not that I shall come back to you. A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body. A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me._

I closed my eyes, and wondered.

---

**Author's Note:** The title of this chapter comes from a line of Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope is the thing with feathers..."; the lines of poetry that Scott reads come from the last chapter of Kahlil Gibran's _The Prophet_. This piece finishes the "Grief" set. Many thanks to Naomi for the beta.


End file.
